Third Reflection

Spring 2026

Throughout the last leg of the program, I have taken the Archival Concepts and Traditions, Collection Development, Preservation Issues, and Digital Collections courses. I was very excited to spend my last semesters in the MLIS program dedicated to archival studies, the area I am most passionate about. I started the next section of my education with the understandings of library and archive principles such as accessibility, discoverability, preservation, user needs, diversity, and I was able to apply these concepts to the real-life situations, discussions, and assignments in these courses. Reflecting on these courses, this was certainly the most confident I have been in my skills and knowledge and the application of my skills and knowledge. Working now in small capacities in two different academic libraries has helped me practice applying course knowledge.  

The Archival Concepts and Traditions course helped me build on my experiences I had in small archives and informed me of archival standards, practices, and procedures. The most difficult part of this course was learning archival appraisal as this was a topic entirely new to me. The assignments, discussions, and readings in this course helped me achieve my goals of amplifying my understanding of archival concepts and techniques (PLG 1.1, PLG 1.2, ALA 5B) as I gained a comprehensive understanding of archival practices and procedures. 

I chose to take the Collection Development course as I had no base understanding of this area and thought this would be helpful if my career were to go in the direction of special collections and archives. This course helped me further reach my goal of exploring the development and enforcement of archival policies and procedures as we learned how to analyze and create a collection development policy (PLG 1.2, ALA 2B). 

Preservation Issues was the course I have been looking forward to the most. I have always been fascinated with preservation and conservation and was excited to learn more about this area. Even though these classes are online, assignments have been geared towards getting that necessary hands-on experience. This course helped me achieve goals I had in rare books and special collections environments. I felt that my goals of increasing my understanding of best practices in handling, storing, and analyzing archival and rare book materials, increasing my knowledge of preservation and conservation techniques that are supported as best practice within the library and archive profession, and increasing my archival management skills and explore the development and enforcement of archival policies and procedures were met during this course (PLG 1.1, PLG 1.2, PLG 2.1, ALA 2A). 

Lastly, the Digital Collections was proven to be a very relevant class in this digital day and age. I chose to take this course because I have been focusing on physical materials and needed to grow my knowledge in the digital-side of librarianship. This course was an obvious help towards my goal of understanding information behaviors of diverse groups to promote accessibility and discoverability as I focused on making sure digital collections are accessible to those of any and all abilities (PLG 4.2, ALA 9C). More surprisingly, this course helped me increase my knowledge of preservation and conservation techniques that are supported as best practice within the library and archive profession as we learned about digital preservation in this class, as well (PLG 1.1). 

Overall, I am very sad to close this chapter of the program. I have seen so much growth in my skills and knowledge as I have worked towards my goals to amplify my understanding of archival concepts and techniques, strengthen my skills in rare books and special collections environments, increase my understanding and awareness of ethics in the library field, and establish reference, research, and access skills to provide excellent user services.